Anyone interested in potentially using these books as a tool in within their ministry setting is eligible to receive one.  My only request is that you commit to reviewing them as a resource as I have a limited amount to give away.

Here is a little information on each book…

Story, Signs and Sacred Rhythms is for youth workers (volunteer, paid or professional) and introduces a unique approach for a theology/philosophy of youth ministry.  The approach I offer in this book is deeply rooted in the mission of God and is designed to help you discover, explore and articulate a framework for guiding students into spiritual formation for the mission of God.  Each chapter has in-depth conversational prompts to help teams discuss, evaluate, plan, etc.

The contents of the book are born out of my experiences as a youth pastor as well as my current role as speaker, trainer and consultant to youth workers and churches throughout North America.

Clear was written with high school students in mind.  It is a book that is designed to help students develop a foundation for a lifetime of following Jesus.  It covers the major areas of doctrine you might expect — God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Church, etc. While each of these major areas are given a chapter, the intention is that the reader/user would interact with the whole narrative of God, giving an informed context to a systematic approach.

Each of the daily interactions are interactive giving the reader opportunities to journal, draw, dig into the Scriptures, write prayers and practically live out their faith.  Several churches I know are using this book as a confirmation supplement/small group curriculum.

If you would like a free copy of either or both of these books, go to the contact form HERE and I will ship one out to you.  As I mentioned above, I have a limited amount of copies to give away so this will be done on a first come first serve basis.  If you have questions about the books or ways to use the books with your ministry team or students don’t hesitate to contact me.

I was reminded in reading Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd (a book I am totally digging) that the reason I am whelmed is simple. “Most business books are written for easy digestion. They are reductive in the same way that subway maps are reductive; the elimination of unnecessary information creates a kind of conceptual isolation that is functionally efficient to the extreme.”

Then I got to thinking about one of my main areas of life foci—youth ministry training (I’ve been working on my workshops for the National Youth Worker Conventions the last few days, so it’s on my mind, and we are launching the fall season of our $5 training this weekend in Chicago).

Youth ministry training is often like this— reductive. It can provide you with a map of sorts, a way to easily read/understand the map, and it might even provide you with a clear way to get from here to there. However, it often does so by eliminating the non-essential information. I contend, however, that what is often perceived as the non-essential information is where various layers or meaning, richness, texture, and context of a more robust understanding of a subject matter lies. Eliminating these essentials renders the training itself limiting and uninspiring, leaving its participants, in many ways, conceptually isolated.

This year, stretch yourself (and your team) and look for and participate in the types of youth ministry training offerings that go beyond the reductive, subway-map approach. Take in a training seminar or workshop that begins and leads to conversations that aren’t “functionally efficient to the extreme” and that pushes you to discover new things in a new way.

Since meeting Andy I’ve found as many ways as possible to find ways to partner with him.  We (Barefoot/Youthfront) brought him down from MSP to KC for some youth worker training last fall and we’ll be doing it again this year.  We are also thrilled to have him as one of our contributors on Slant33.com.  I hope we find more ways to work with Andy because I truly believe that what he offers (a thoughtful, robust theological framework) is something all of our faith communities should absorb and practice.

Andy is giving away one of his recent book releases called, Unfiltered Relationships.

Here are the details from Andy:

If you’ll email me (aroot@luthersem.edu) I’ll send you a free copy of the book so you can look it over and decide if it would be of help to you and your volunteers.  If you’re interested in using it you can then go to:

http://www.zondervan.com/cultures/en-us/ministrywelcome.htm

and type in the code 980752 in the “source code” box.

Starting August 1 this will give you a 40% discount on as many books as you’d like.

And I’ll also offer this, if you do use the book with your team, I’m willing to do a select number of skype or ichat conversations with you and your team after getting through the book.

——————–

I’ve read this book.  It is a terrific book that will surely help you with one of the most important aspects of youth ministry — relationships.  If I were you, I would take advantage of this remarkable give-a-way… today!

However, I’m not having a lot of explicit, everyday missional conversation with youth workers. I would say that almost every day I talk (via blog, email, phone, Twitter, whatever) with a different youth worker in my city or around the world who has a question or two about some facet of youth ministry. Most of the time, however, it isn’t about the missional nature of youth ministry, which in my mind is the core of all ministry—the mission of God to restore the world to its intended wholeness. Typically, the questions I get are about a game, a particular resource, a training concept, a relevant SS curriculum they can use, a small group book to use, etc. Many if not most of the conversations I have about youth ministry are not about the core but about peripherals.  The peripherals are important but not primary.

This raises, for me, questions. Questions like:

• Why aren’t youth workers talking about missional youth ministry?
• Are youth workers so entrenched in doing missional youth ministry that they don’t need to talk about it?
• Do we think that missional thought and practice are for big church?
• Do youth workers not want to talk missional because that means change and hard work and a lack of clarity as to what a successful youth ministry might look like?
• Is it that each of our ministry contexts are so different that we don’t have anything in common to discuss?
• Do youth workers not have a grasp on what missional youth ministry is and therefore don’t explicitly talk about it?
• Is it that the word missional has become tied to the emergent/emerging church movement so youth workers are fearful and skeptical?
• Are youth workers ignorant about missional and, because they can’t articulate it, choose to stay away from it, as if it is a dirty word? That must be it.  Missional is a dirty word. Well, if that is the case, talk missional to me, baby!
  

Seriously, can we have a meaningful conversation about what it means to engage God’s story and mission and what it means to let it form us as we form others? Can we talk openly, honestly, and inquisitively about what missional might mean in our divergent contexts? Can we at the very least admit that missional is a life without center or circumference? A life of living like Jesus that isn’t tied to a geographic location or held in by boundaries? Can we talk about what this means for youth ministry and specifically for the faith formation of our teens?

Youth ministry needs more missional people thinking more deeply and more practically about what it means for youth ministry to shift toward a more missional (or sometimes called narrative) approach. Youth ministry needs non-missional thinkers and doers to be brought into what should be explicit, everyday conversations about life and ministry.

What do you think missional youth ministry is? In what ways would you define it? How would you articulate it to others?

Some people ask me, “How many infomercials do I need to sit through about your product?” Others sometimes say, “It must be like 1/3 training and 2/3rds promo for your products?”  Nope.  It is not that way at all.  Our $5 Training initiative was born out of a passion to give quality training that youth workers can afford.  We prefer that people are able to bring their entire teams and therefore, build community with one another as they stretch their thinking together.

Our seminars are completely legit.  In my mind, they are as good as any seminar you can get at any youth worker gathering in North America.  We spend hours and hours developing them and testing them.  We choose the topics based off of input and feedback from networks of youth workers throughout North America and we carefully develop the schedule to maximize deep learning in such a short period of time.

Now, with that said, there is a sense of marketing to this, of course.  We want to expose you to the many wonderful things that Barefoot is up to and one of the ways we do this is by telling our story through our training.  BUT, it isn’t an infomercial by any stretch of the imagination.  Simply said, it is a look inside of our heart and there you will find exactly what drives you, the Jesus Creed, to love God and love others.

So come to our training!  Our training season kicks off on August, 28th in the greater Chicago area.  We hope that you’ll join us.  For more information on our complete training schedule, seminar descriptions, etc., visit HERE.

The truth of the matter is that nearly all of my creative energy over the last year has been going to other more demanding projects.  Since joining Barefoot my priorities have been on organizational reculturing and, therefore, some of my other desires have taken a back seat.  Blogging (both macro and micro) has not been as urgent as redeveloping Barefoot into being on its way towards greater health, sustainability, growth and ministry impact.  I am having crazy amounts of fun working with Barefoot as we invent and rework many new and existing products.  Over the last year…

• We’ve acquired a youth ministry magazine and and re-launched it as the Immerse Journal.  With the help of Mike King, Tim Baker and a host of great writers we’ve gotten off to a wonderful start.  We hope to have an iPad version in the next few weeks.
• We’ve Redeveloped what was formerly “Credo Magazine” into “Credo Journal” with the help of Michael Novelli and Imago Media.  This journal is sweet.  One of my favorite projects to date. We’ve completely changed the way students might think of “doing devotions” into more of tool to help them develop a more holistic and robust way of life. You can see a sample HERE.
• We’ve released a few new books including, Bleed-Out, Sacred Community, and In-Transit.  We have three more releases coming this fall.  One is a reprint of Lesslie Newbigin’s, A Walk Through The Bible, another is a book called, Sacred Hope and the third is a book called, Be Un: Reverse Your Life.
• We’ve launched www.slant33.com and have gotten great feedback on its innovation and usefulness, thanks to our wonderful contributors.  We continue to hear stories from youth workers who share the articles/posts with their volunteers and, therefore, are pushing their teams to think more theologically about youth ministry.  Look for the next evolution to www.slant33.com in the next few months!
• We’ve added 15 new or returning cities on our $5 youth ministry training tour.  This year we will be covering three very important topics in our training seminars – small group ministry, evangelism, and the art of mentoring.  You can get more info about the seminars and locations near you HERE.
• We’ve clustered a wonderful series of other youth ministry training workshops.  As a part of our Barefoot Training, you can attend one of our great workshops on narrative youth ministry — what we call a transformational approach.  Most of the training content comes from my most recent book called, Story, Signs and Sacred Rhythms.  Pick up a copy of the book HERE and then contact my friend Paul to host our training in your church and/or community.  We’ve kept the cost of attending these workshops below $30 so that you can bring your entire youth ministry team.  We hope to be in around 60 cities this year.
• We’ve dramatically reworked our Sunday School Curriculum.  We are now using a much more experiential learning/learner-centered model than in years past.  We hope that this new approach not only helps the leader with a more conversational/formational approach but also has a long lasting impact on the learners.  If you don’t have SS content for this fall yet, I’d snatch it up now.  You can learn more about it HERE.
• We’ve got three or four new ministry tools coming out this fall including a new series of digital books called, Reverb BookShorts.  We are partnering with Mike King and Youthfront on the development of these.  We also are launching what we are calling, Bloom Books.  These are seriously simple books for your students with everyday practices for a flourishing faith.  Each of these books includes a leader/facilitator guide for an experiential retreat.   We are in the midst of redeveloping our subscription based website called, Barefoot Online into a more robust site which includes new and revised content, a whole new look and a host of youth worker training.  Finally, we will be releasing the first in a series of three (maybe more) books for parents of adolescents called, The Parent Journey.
• We’ve been working on our A World unBroken project and it is coming along nicely.  In 2011 we’ll be releasing a whole group missional living project which will include 1) a book for youth workers (authors such as Scot McKnight, Mark Oestreicher, Kara Powell, Ian Cron, Mike King, Jason Barnhart, Pamela Erwin, Mae Elise Cannon and more!) 2) a missional journal for students and a 3) DVD with a bunch of great resources such as animated film shorts, curriculum, promo videos, etc.  You can check out one of the promo videos HERE.

So, most of my creative energy over the last few months (almost a year, really) has gone into the above.  Of course, the team at Barefoot is responsible for the implementation and execution of all of the above.  I work with an amazingly talented group of people who understand and our passionate about what it means to serve the church by helping youth workers guide students into spiritual formation for the mission of God.

All that to say, I think I’ve gotten my life and schedule figured out enough to start blogging again.  I’ve said that a few other times but honestly, I feel like I now have some creative energy I can put toward my blog and other projects.  Maybe if I hustle and write some good content I can keep my top 10 status on the YS ranking!

If you want a quick visual overview of all that we are doing at Barefoot, go HERE.

My friend Marko was giving me junk in an email today for being ranked 9 out of the top 20 youth ministry blogs by Youth Specialites when I haven’t even posted since March!  So… I thought it would be a good idea to throw a post up here and get back in the game.  Thanks for the love YS!  You’ve inspired me…

A few weeks ago I mentioned that Barefoot Ministries acquired The Journal of Student Ministries (read the my post about that HERE) and that we would be launching a re-designed journal in its place called, Immerse: A Journal of Faith, Life and Youth Ministry.  We launched the beta website today at www.immersejournal.com and we are still on target to release our first issue in a couple of weeks (May/June).

We’ve put together a preview issue so you can check out what the content of the journal will be like and so that you can take advantage of a free issue offer.  Check out www.immersejournal.com and subscribe to our journal/e-journal and get our inaugural issue for free!

I’m thrilled about the advisory board that we’ve brought together as well as the authors, columnists and other contributors that we have writing in our first print issue and online.  We are adding more online columns and our advisory board isn’t quite complete yet either.  But… we are on our way!

A couple of friends (Mike King, Scot McKnight and Dave Rahn)  have started a wonderful conversation on the mission of God over at www.slant33.com.  Check it out HERE!